lazy and confused

facebook vs Me!

I seriously don't know what to write now. I do have a lot of things that I want to write but at the moment I am not able to express anything. One of the reason to reboot this blog was to deactivate my facebook account. I feel I am spending too much of my precious time in facebook which I should have been utilizing in more fruitful way. It is not like that I don't have any hobby. I love sports and playing basketball is/was one of my favorite pastime. I have wanted to tone up my muscles as well. (Well, having a great body have a lot of advantages over girls.) And I have excellent excuse for not doing any of those activities. I have been slacking off a lot simply being lazy.

Come to think of it, i was not that lazy before. I always used to play basketball 5 days a week back home. But now I just think I am in Norway where internet is superfast. And voila I am glued to the computer in facebook and in watching movies. (By the way if you want to watch movie www.letmewatchthis.com is the best site that I have found.) Every night I sleep thinking from tomorrow I will do something creative, study and go to the gym. But I wake up late (always) and think that let me just check the updates in my facebook and then I will go out and go to the gym. And after browsing facebook I am tempted to stay more for half an hour more, one hour more and so on. And before I know it I am watching series. (Right now I am watching Prisonbreak and White collar which are great shows.) And the worst part is I am not even hungry. I am just in my room while the beautiful summer is out.

It is not like facebook is the "demon" and I am against it. It has helped me to network and relive moments with my long lost buddies. It is the "waiting for updates" that is taking all the time. I do think "waiting is wasting" and I am wasting my time more than actually doing something creative. After all Time is money; If you spend it all in one place, you won't have enough left when you need it. So, I tried to find online work for writing (www.scriptlance.com). Though it was a good experience but I did not succeed in getting any. And the bad side is my inbox is always full with email from the site. At first I used to check regularly but not seeing any results I have stopped to care. I need to be more patient. I guess there is nothing that I want to do other then wait. 

Tomorrow is a new day with new hope. I hope I can initiate some if not all. 

"Time is money. If you spend it all in one place, you won't have enough left when you need it."

A new beginning..

Almost after 3 years i have decided to reboot my blog. There has been a lot of changes within these years. On personal level, I finished by bachelors, worked for two years and now i am in Norway for further study. I hope I have matured more and become a better person. In these years, I made great friends, seen some ups and many downs of the life; all in all enjoying life to the fullest. I do think I have become more determined than ever. I have set some goals for my life and am determined to achieve them. 

Einstein says

Zinedine Zidane

HAIR COLOR CHEMISTRY

People have been coloring their hair for thousands of years using plants and minerals. Some of these natural agents contain pigments (e.g., henna, black walnut shells commonly called “Rittha”) and others contain natural bleaching agents or cause reactions that change the color of hair (e.g., vinegar). Natural pigments generally work by coating the hair shaft with color. Some natural colorants last through several shampoos, but they aren't necessarily safer. It's difficult to get consistent results using natural colorants, plus some people are allergic to the ingredients.

Temporary Hair Color: Temporary or semi-permanent hair colors consists of acidic dyes. These acidic dyes gets deposited onto the outside of the hair shaft or may consist of small pigment molecules that can slip inside the hair shaft, using a small amount of peroxide (or none at all). In some cases several colorant molecules enter the hair to form a larger complex inside the hair shaft. Shampooing will eventually dislodge temporary hair color. These products don't contain ammonia, meaning that the hair shaft isn't opened up during processing and the hair's natural color is retained once the product washes out.

Permanent Hair Color: The outer layer of the hair shaft, its cuticle, must be opened before permanent color can be deposited into the hair. Once the cuticle is open, the dye reacts with the inner portion of the hair, the cortex, to deposit or remove the color. Most permanent hair colors use a two-step process which first removes the original color of the hair and then secondly deposits a new color. Ammonia is the alkaline chemical that opens the cuticle and allows the hair color to penetrate the cortex of the hair. It also acts as a catalyst when the permanent hair color comes together with the peroxide. Peroxide is used as the developer or oxidizing agent. The developer removes pre-existing color. Peroxide breaks chemical bonds in hair, releasing sulfur, which accounts for the characteristic odor of hair color. As the melanin is decolorized, a new permanent color is bonded to the hair cortex. Various types of alcohols and conditioners may also be present in hair color. The conditioners close the cuticle after coloring to seal in and protect the new color.

Hair Lightening: Bleach is used to lighten hair. The bleach reacts with the melanin in hair, removing the color in an irreversible chemical reaction. The bleach oxidizes the melanin molecule. The melanin is still present, but the oxidized molecule is colorless. However, bleached hair tends to have a pale yellow tint. The yellow color is the natural color of keratin, the structural protein in hair, so some gold or red residual color may remain after lightening. Hydrogen peroxide is one of the most common lightening agents. The peroxide is used in an alkaline solution, which opens the hair shaft to allow the peroxide to react with the melanin.

BIOCHEMISTRY of LOVE

Donatella Marazziti, a psychiatrist at the University of Pisa, made a name for herself in 1999 by trying to identify the physiological origins of love. Her original research involved measuring serotonin levels in the blood of people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. Then, perhaps thinking "people in love are kind of obsessive," she expanded her study.

Her team recruited students who had recently fallen in love, and who had obsessed about their new love for at least four hours every day but who had not yet consumated the relationship with sex. Seventeen women and three men volunteered. A separate group of people with OCD was studied at the same time, as was a control group.

Members of all three groups were tested for a serotonin transporter protein in their blood platelets. The control group was normal. The obsessive-compulsives were low by 40%. And the people in love, also low by 40%.

Blood serotonin is not a perfect proxy for serotonin levels in the brain, but it's an intriguing suggestion that, biochemically at least, falling in love provokes madness.

Marazziti won an Ig Nobel Prize for this work in 2000. You can find her study written up in Psychological Medicine (vol 29, p 741, 1999). Her abstract follows as:

"The evolutionary consequences of love are so important that there must be some long-established biological process regulating it. Recent findings suggest that the serotonin (5-HT) transporter might be linked to both neuroticism and sexual behaviour as well as to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The similarities between an overvalued idea, such as that typical of subjects in the early phase of a love relationship, and obsession, prompted us to explore the possibility that the two conditions might share alterations at the level of the 5-HT transporter. METHODS: Twenty subjects who had recently (within the previous 6 months) fallen in love, 20 unmedicated OCD patients and 20 normal controls, were included in the study. The 5-HT transporter was evaluated with the specific binding of 3H-paroxetine (3H-Par) to platelet membranes. RESULTS: The results showed that the density of 3H-Par binding sites was significantly lower in subjects who had recently fallen in love and in OCD patients than in controls. DISCUSSION: The main finding of the present study is that subjects who were in the early romantic phase of a love relationship were not different from OCD patients in terms of the density of the platelet 5-HT transporter, which proved to be significantly lower than in the normal controls. This would suggest common neurochemical changes involving the 5-HT system, linked to psychological dimensions shared by the two conditions, perhaps at an ideational level."

David Beckham "England's BEST"